Originally Posted by
Iride01
Are you sure it's not someone else's idea of a joke? Maybe a cyclist with a little artistic talent taking a slightly activist view of bike locks.
Probably not. (Guessing you don't live in a big city.)
I've often seen bikes in time lapse states of disassembly over weeks or months in downtown Baltimore. Once the first few parts are gone, people start taking what they happen to need currently for their bikes.
When I was using two bikes for commuting each day (3 miles to the Baltimore train station, then 4 miles to the office in DC), I even had a few pieces stolen from the various bikes I used over 20 years, e.g., an Ultegra front brake and a rear skewer off a Schwinn Peloton in DC and a front wheel and a saddle and seatpost off a Cannondale SM500 MTB in Baltimore, despite the fact that the bikes were locked in plain sight in the stations' bike racks.